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Saturday, 4 January 2014

Why Is Bitcoin Gaining Popularity

Bitcoin
popularity has seen a huge rise in past 2 months, mainly due to the price jump
which resulted due to China buying huge amount of the first crypto currency.
More and more places start to accept bitcoins as a legit payment method,
alongside credit cards, cash and PayPal – it has relatively small transaction
fees, compared to 2-3% of CC processors, which adds to the incentive. The price
is oscillating at the level of 800 USD at the moment, seeing a huge rise since
six months ago, when I was barely worth 150$.

A bit of history first. 3rd
January 2009 is the date of introduction of the Bitcoin protocol, done by
pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto. At first, it has been widely
recognized as something that criminals used. The famous Silk Road used it as
primary currency, but it has been shutdown in 2013 by FBI, who seized what is
now estimated to be worth 28.5 million USD of bitcoins. The start of BTC was
marked with early technical problems, for example in 2009 an exploit existed,
that allowed the creation of unlimited bitcoins. In relation to other
currencies, BTC has appreciated rapidly. In 2011, first boom happened, when the
value of one coin went from 30 cents to a bit over 30 dollars, then dropped
back to 2$.

One of the reasons Bitcoin is
gaining popularity is because of all the fuss media has made in the last
months, along with the price jump. Ordinary people, who haven’t heard about it
before, suddenly are told that BTC is semi-viable alternative to Euro our British
Pound. This contributes to the attention the crypto currency gets, therefore
resulting in rise of the value.

Another reason is because you
don’t even have to work to gain the currency. All you have to do is setup your
computer to “mine” the coins – there’s zero effort in doing that, and we’ll
cover how to do so in future article. Of course, you won’t be gaining 100$ per
hour out of nowhere – if you want to start mining seriously, you will need to
invest in GPUs suitable to mine.

Bitcoin is also popular thanks
due to the anonymity it provides, while maintaining platform secure enough to
prevent chargebacks or frauds. Of course, the platform could be a victim of a
hacker attack, but those are pretty rare and success of those depends on how
the user secures their own wallet.

All in all, BTC is gaining
popularity because it’s a good alternative to real-world currencies, which are
controlled by huge institutions and banks. If only more shops and services
supported payments in bitcoins!